Immortal Memories

I was quite looking forward to celebrating Trafalgar Night in France. This weekend, I was meant to be attending an international colloquium on 17^th century European dockyards in Rochefort (yes, some of us know how to live the high life), and thanks to the oddities of Ryanair’s La Rochelle schedule, I was meant to have flown out on Wednesday for an event beginning on Friday. I’d booked into the hotel converted out of part of the Corderie Royale, the great ropewalk built to service Louis XIV’s warships. The plan was to order rosbif for dinner (what else?) and loudly toast the Immortal Memory, possibly singing ‘Rule Britannia’ as well if sufficient Merlot had slipped down the ways. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, though, the event was cancelled at the last minute because even many of the French delegates couldn’t get there, thanks to petrol shortages and transport strikes stemming from the ongoing protests against President Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age to sixty-two (which, in terms of the average number of hours worked per week, probably translates into a British equivalent of about forty-five).

So here I am at home, contemplating the tragi-comedy of the ‘Strategic Defence and Security Review’ - more on my other blog – and reflecting on last weekend, when I attended the Historical Novels Society conference. This was a really enjoyable and useful event: those who write and read historical fiction are clearly much more fun than many of those who attend academic historical conferences! I also attended a Q&A session with Bernard Cornwell, who gave some valuable insights into how he works as well as convincing me that I should add his latest book, The Fort, to my Christmas list. The only real highlight in my recent reading has been C J Sansom’s fifth Shardlake novel, Heartstone, which culminates in the sinking of the Mary Rose. It’s a good read, but I don’t think it’s Sansom at his best: with the best will in the world, a plot centred on the complexities of 16^th century wardship law faces an uphill battle, and Sansom’s lack of grounding in naval history is apparent in his scenes aboard the doomed ship. The sinking itself feels rushed and almost an afterthought. Even so, it’ll be fascinating to see how the Shardlake novels are adapted for TV; the casting of Kenneth Branagh as the title character raises one’s hopes, and let’s face it, they wouldn’t have to do too much to better the current adaption of The Pillars of the Earth on Channel 4, which seems to contain more ham than all of Sainsburys, Tesco and Waitrose combined. 

Finally, probably the last-ever traditional slipway launch of a British warship took place on 11 October when HMS Duncan took to the water in Glasgow. Having written a biographical essay on the man after which she’s named, I thought I’d provide a link to the film of the ceremony. We shall never see its like again.

Fragile Heritage

Within the last 24 hours, I came across two stories involving the potential destruction of irreplaceable heritage that have particular and immediate resonance for me. As I've spent the day working on the proofs of Blood of Kings, my new book about the 'Gowrie Conspiracy', it was strange to see the news story about a van demolishing the historic gateway at Scone Palace, which was originally built in c.1580 for William Ruthven, first Earl of Gowrie, and is mentioned several times within the pages I've been checking today. Given the speed at which the van must have been going to cause such damage - and to end up so far beyond the gate - it would probably have been quite entertaining to be a fly on the wall when the driver attempted to explain what had happened to his employer. I'm tempted to try and work some sort of reference to the crash into the proofs, but I doubt if my publisher would thank me... This photo of the gate in happier times was taken during my most recent visit to Scone, in November 2009.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles to the south, the statue of Admiral Sir Robert Holmes in Yarmouth church on the Isle of Wight is in grave danger from that perennial curse of old buildings, the leaking roof. In some respects, Holmes is almost an 'old friend' - I wrote his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, a photo of the statue features on my website, and he appears as a central character in the second Quinton novel, The Mountain of Gold - so I've written to Yarmouth Town Council to offer my support for the cause. It's unfortunate that this potentially catastrophic situation won't receive as much publicity as the rather more obvious and 'media-friendly' disaster at Scone, and it's a racing certainty that the latter, unlike Yarmouth, will quickly obtain the funds for reconstruction. But I wonder which of the two pieces of our heritage is actually rarer, and intrinsically more worthy of long-term preservation?

Finally, today's post brought a copy of the audio book of Gentleman Captain. The workload means I haven't had time to listen to more than the beginning of Chapter One, but it's been distinctly eerie to hear one's own words being read aloud by someone else! A big thank you to Jonathan Keeble for doing such a wonderful job on bringing my characters and dialogue to life.

The Death of the Pub, Part 2

Apartheid is alive and well, and can be witnessed on the main street of any town in Britain on a Friday and Saturday night. It is not an apartheid founded on race; it is not even founded on gender. It is the insidious apartheid of age. Walk into any pub in those town centres and count the number of people over forty. Yes, there’ll be some – the ageing macho men trying desperately to relive their youth, hopefully pulling a giggling, paralytic young bimbo in the process, or the mutton-dressed-as-bedroom-fodder in unfeasibly short skirts. But relative to the proportions of the age groups in the population at large, this is Logan’s Run for licensed premises, with a comprehensive cull of those too old to fit in with the herds of inebriated yoof. So forget all the angst about happy hours, aggressive advertising and the other alleged causes of Britain’s binge drinking ‘problem’: the real root cause of dysfunctional drinking among the young is that they no longer drink with the old. Consider what used to happen in industrial towns throughout the country. In the evening, or after the completion of a shift, workers of all ages would spill out into the pubs together. The young learned the mores of drinking, subliminally or more overtly, from an older generation; not temperance by any means (the older men could invariably drink the young under the table), but rather the lost art of how to hold one’s drink. And if one of the younger men overdid it and misbehaved, an informal police force of workmates and/or relatives (often one and the same) was at hand to instil discipline or to get the miscreant home as quietly as possible. Pubs catered for all ages, and even if they were smoky, stinking bastions of misogynism, they also often had a ‘snug’ where older ladies could feel comfortable. Contrast that with the barn-like urban monstrosities favoured by the avaricious corporate pub chains, which usually have no quiet corners and are geared exclusively at herding as many young people as possible through the doors and ‘persuading’ them to consume far more cheap booze than is good for them. (Is anything this side of Parliament more hypocritical than the alcohol industry's 'Drinkaware' website, and their injunctions to 'enjoy Extra Strength Cirrhosis Juice responsibly'? I doubt it.) Conversely, of course, rural or more traditional pubs are often shunned by many young people simply on the grounds that older people go there, so they’re perceived as ‘uncool’, and/or they don’t have vast plasma screens pumping out endless MTV or Sky Sports.

My father used to tell a story of how he and his father would often go out for a drink together; this must have been in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when my dad was in his early twenties. My father would buy the first round- a pint for himself, a pint for his father. Then my grandfather would go up to buy the second round, and would return with a pint for himself, a half for my father. Nothing was ever said; it did not need to be. It was the unspoken understanding of the generations. But the wholesale destruction of British manufacturing industry in the 1980s broke that understanding, thus exacerbating the steadily increasing attitudinal divisions between generations that had been taking place from at least the 1950s onwards. The brewers finished the job by sweeping away the traditional concept of the pub, increasing the strength of alcohol and, in town and city centres at least, focusing almost exclusively on youth (with breathtaking shortsightedness, of course, for they did so at exactly the time that the number of young people relative to the population as a whole was in sharp decline, and the disposable income of the older sections of society was increasing). All of this, I suggest, long preceded the smoking ban and its undoubtedly detrimental effect on the survival prospects for many British pubs, albeit not for the actual customer experience within those that do survive.


Well, I think I've vented my spleen sufficiently on the decline of the pub (pro tem, at any rate!) so in the next post I'll return to more literary matters.